Fighting phone addiction
This week I noticed a few people starting to share their home-screens on Twitter. Pretty ordinary stuff, except all of the home-screens were grayscaled. Investigating the trend further it appears to originate from Tristan Harris in an attempt to make us less addicted to our phones. I'm testing it this week, both on my phone and in this newsletter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/grayscale-phone.html
Asking quality questions
Wired's co-founder Kevin Kelly is a voice I listen carefully to. Therefore I enjoyed spending almost an hour with him in the On Being podcast. What stuck with me from the episode is the importance of searching for questions over answers. Algorithms are unbeatable in finding answers, but humans have a lead on quality questions. https://onbeing.org/programs/kevin-kelly-the-universe-is-a-question-jan2018/
Trusting what we consume
Out of Reddit has spun a new genre of algorithm generated sex videos. Users match footage of famous people with adult entertainment actors. Allegedly resulting in very convincing videos. This reminds me that one of the foremost important tasks of the years to come is to generate a system for trusting the content we consume online.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley